


Unwilling

by Cryptographic_Delurk



Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age II
Genre: Angst, Blood Magic, Bondage, Dragon Age II Quest - A Bitter Pill, F/M, Femdom, Mutual Masturbation, dubcon, like bloodbending puppeteering bondage, misery porn
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-25
Updated: 2020-08-25
Packaged: 2021-03-06 23:28:07
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,741
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26117206
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cryptographic_Delurk/pseuds/Cryptographic_Delurk
Summary: Neither Fenris nor Merrill are sure what a willing sacrifice is.-“Do you let yourself touch anything without shredding it anymore?”He wasn’t going to answer, so long as she held the blood in his lips and tongue still.“Do you even touch yourself?” Merrill asked.
Relationships: Fenris/Merrill (Dragon Age)
Comments: 8
Kudos: 16





	Unwilling

**Author's Note:**

> Written for day four of Fenrill Week on tumblr, splitting the difference between the prompts ‘fear’ and ‘desire’.
> 
> As a warning, this fic takes both characters to higher levels of vindictiveness, manipulation, and disrespect than I usually interpret them at, but I’m also not sure if I really pressed those boundaries as far into darkfic territory as I was originally intending. Your mileage may vary. ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯
> 
> If it suits, please Read & Relax~

“ _They sacrifice the unwilling?” Merrill clutched her staff and tried not to wince. There was blood everywhere here, on the floor and on the walls and across that altar._

_The sheer excessiveness of it bothered Merrill as much as anything. There was still so much power along these surfaces – unused blood and slick – rife for the taking. They cut people open and gutted the bulk of the power out of them, and then left the residue sticky on the tile. Merrill could never have afforded to be so wasteful. She never was when she drained the power from Hawke’s kills._

“ _Is that so hard to believe?” Fenris scoffed. “You are only a step away from it yourself.”_

“ _That’s not true,” Merrill said. But it scared her. She was always scared. And she never could be, because the demon was waiting for that – waiting to grab her fear and drown her with it._

_Fenris’s retort was interrupted by the scurry of walking corpses and shambling abominations and, while most people would not have found it so, it was a reprieve. Merrill could not be scared when there was battle and adrenaline to tide her through._

_Merrill said a quick prayer and asked for permission._ Lethallen na melana sahlin, in tu Setheneran din emma na. I’ll kill the ones that did this. Your deaths won’t be in vain. Let me use you.

_She did not wait for an answer that would never come. She pulled the blood off the altar, and turned it to a wall of ice to press back the foe._

* * *

Merrill knew there were too many hours between now and when the restlessness would leave her. Her little hovel was dank and cold, but less so since she found a way to vent a hearth. She sat at the table with her books and made notes when her attention came back to her and she could.

She had learned Elvish first, then the common tongue, a little Rivaini, and then she’d had to figure out how to decode the Ancient Tevene in these books found at market. And for what? The Tevinters had stolen the Eluvians from the People, and didn’t even had the decency to keep good records of them.

Frustrations were high, and she wanted to sleep. But if she did now it would be restless and she would dream only of Tamlen and Mahariel and the Black City, and the demons would find her. And she’d think about Hadriana’s face as she died, and be sickened and glad. And it was good Fenris had killed her, because Merrill would have had to do it otherwise, for those she had promised at that altar.

This was why she hated going out with Fenris and Anders on errands. They were always taking her places that reeked of death and corruption. And they were always doing this – making her scattered and restless and scared. They put the fear of demons in her, the fear of everything she was doing and becoming and giving up, and it only made her weaker. More exhausted and worn and susceptible to everything they warned her against.

The bang on the door was a surprise, at this hour. But the light was on, and there was nothing that Merrill feared that needed to knock to slip inside. She left the ink and her reading and the dwindling fire and went to open the door.

It was Fenris, who looked a wreck and felt a wretch. And for all he was unwelcome, even now Merrill felt the thrum of sympathy. All his life he had been used, and he was never free because he was always running.

“Are you alright, Fenris?” Merrill asked. “Do you need not to be alone?”

“Spare me your pity,” Fenris snarled. “Are your foes willing when you twist the blood inside them and hold them still? Are the corpses your thorns tangle and drain from those of willing sacrifices?”

Merrill thought this was a strange way of saying, no, he didn’t want to be alone.

“You say you are different from them, but you’re not!” Fenris accused.

Merrill leaned against the door frame and crossed her arms over her chest. “If I was the same as them, you wouldn’t stand here trying to convince me. You’d just rip me apart like you did to her.”

The emotions passed over Fenris’s face, hot and cold, ascending and descending too rapidly for Merrill to interpret. He flexed his hands in their gauntlets, and for a moment she though he might be raging, for all his hands were steady and his words had been whole and direct. But then she saw the way his eyes flickered between her and the table and shelf behind her, and saw the moment he made the decision, curt and calculated, to brush past her.

The paper flew off the table first. He swept his arm over the top of it and sent the sheets cascading to the floor. The inkpot dropped and stained the sheets.

“Fenris,” Merrill said. “You can come in, but you don’t have to-”

The chair he picked and threw at the wall, which may have cracked the leg. Nothing that couldn’t be fixed. But he walked further into the room.

“Fenris!” she followed him. Unsure of whether to step between him and his destination. Because what if that didn’t make him stop. He was large for an elf, as large as some humans. And he was strong, she knew.

He grabbed the shelf by its back and dashed it to the floor. And all the books rolled off of it and their pages bent as they were smashed against the floor. And the halla statue was there too and Merrill hoped the antlers wouldn’t crack.

“Stop it, Fenris,” Merrill said. And she tried to make her voice cold and commanding, and not as frazzled as she was feeling.

Fenris turned to her and raised a challenging eyebrow. “Make me,” he said, as he ripped a book apart by the spine.

He tossed the halves of it at the fire, and Merrill was lucky it was dying and the hard leather wrap of the book smothered the remaining flames instead of feeding them.

She had gathered these things from nothing. She walked from Nevarra to Ferelden, and carried nothing she could have afforded to be without. And then the Eluvian had signalled the coming end of that nomadicism. She’d begged Marethari to have its pieces carted with them when they left for the Marches, and all the time she cried and cursed herself for the bitterness it had brought out in everyone around her. And everything she had in Kirkwall – every book bartered and gathered from merchants at the dock, and every piece of furniture sawed and built from wood, and every souvenir she’d collected from Isabela and Varric and Anders and Bethany and her adventures with everyone. She’d made all of that all on her own for herself.

Fenris kicked the fallen shelf, and he was making a racket. And the walls here in the Alienage were thin, and what must everyone think? Merrill thought of the domestic squabbles she had interrupted, and the shame beaten wives carried with them afterwards.

 _Stop it. Stop it._ she chanted. But Fenris had made it to the threshold for the bed room and the water room, and there were things she couldn’t afford to have ruined. The Eluvian was there, and Tamlen and Mahariel and the Black City. And she could not let him dash that to the ground and stomp it to dust.

The blood curled inside of him, hard enough to choke. It was only a bite on her finger, and a pinprick through the ruined skin, and Fenris’s own blood could power the rest. Merrill panted, regaining her breath as she held him still. It was blessed quiet. He couldn’t speak, so long as she held his mouth and tongue in place. He couldn’t even breathe, so long as she constricted around his lungs this way.

She was not quite that cruel, so she let his lungs go. And thankfully he used this freedom to breathe, instead of scream. She rearranged Fenris into what could have been mistaken for a relaxed position. Standing legs shoulder width apart, arms at his side. She urged him to stand with his back to the wall, as she went to peer inside her bedroom.

The Eluvian’s surface was sheer and opaque and the taint was not leaking through. And Merrill let go a sigh of relief because even without Fenris having made it inside to disrupt that room, there were sometimes disruptions that happened all by themselves and it would have been too much to handle atop everything else.

Everything was a mess in the main room, and Merrill thought about using Fenris to fix it, but instead she held him and made him watch, as the pinprick burned on her finger and burned in his veins. She thought of being small, and how she’d broken a hair ornament in her clumsiness, and gotten into a fight with Ineria and slapped her in the face with nature magic, and taken twice her portion of dessert at supper. And how Marethari had made her to stand in corners and be held apart from the others until shame burned her face and burned every step she took.

It was how she thought of Fenris now, like a child that needed to be taught what shame was. She thought about how smart he could be, and how proud, and how much he’d hate the condescension, and Merrill was glad.

She walked about the room with light steps. She righted the shelf and the chairs, and picked up the books and figures to replace on the shelf. She salvaged everything she could and felt Fenris’s eyes follow her around the room as she did it. Her grip on him was at times more suggestion than fact, like a leash she could tighten if he tried to escape it. But he stayed still and quiet, and Merrill paid him only cursory attention as she mopped the ink and salvaged whatever she could of the damaged paper and books. When she was done she set a new fire in the hearth. It was late and cold.

When she finally turned her attention back to him, she realised where all his blood had gone. The spell took very little fuel to maintain so long as he was not fighting its hold, and she had burned through very little of him and herself. Instead his blood had pooled to his groin. Merrill skipped up to him and turned her face to look at the way his eyes were dilated. So this was what made things work for him.

She thought she might have been afraid, but she was already inside him – tiny tendrils of blood that could seize him and paralyse him again completely if he tried to lunge for her and rip her apart. He could not hurt her, not unless he tried much harder to do so than he had.

“Take off your gauntlets,” Merrill commanded. And tugged at the blood in his hands.

Fenris did the rest, unstrapping them and pulling loose his fingers and letting them fall to the floor.

Merrill grabbed one empty hand in hers. The lyrium lines traced the pads of his fingers, and Merrill ran her own fingers over the blunted edge of his nails. She lifted up his hand and pressed it in to cup her cheek. She felt rather than saw the blood rushing to his face.

“Do you let yourself touch anything without shredding it anymore?” Merrill asked.

He wasn’t going to answer, so long as she held his lips and tongue still.

“Do you even touch yourself?”

Merrill took Fenris’s hand and set it back at his side, next to his thigh. She studied him for a moment, the slight hitch in his breath and the cold sweat at his brow.

“Is this what you want?” she asked. She let her influence over him leave his head, his mouth, his neck. A fine measure of control.

Fenris seemed almost a little bashful in the way he turned his eyes to the floor.

“Yes,” he mumbled.

“Well… come along then,” Merrill agreed. She jerked his legs forward, and he followed her into the bedroom. Merrill enjoyed the stiff awkwardness of his movements, constrained in part under her direction. She set him to lean against the wall across from her bed, and fussed. She smoothed the sheets, and after a moment of struggle managed to turn the Eluvian so it faced the wall.

She looked at Fenris and bit her lip. She was already dressed down for the night, in a simple shawl and leggings, and she removed them both so she was left only an undershirt and her bared bottom.

She flopped down to sit on the edge of the bed. “Pants off then.”

He seemed to want her to do it, from how he hesitated. And she did. She liked, somehow, the dextrous work that was attempting to slide his fingers under the waistband of his leggings, and press them down to his knees.

He was dark there, no white lines, and more than half hard.

“Are you afraid?” she asked. And when he gave no answer. “Touch yourself.”

She watched him do so, with an almost clinical interest. He followed her instruction with little urging, bracing against the wall and spreading his legs a bit. He was going fast though, and would probably rub himself raw.

“Slow down.” And when he wouldn’t, she stilled his hand and watched him wince.

“Please?” he whimpered.

“Only if you go more slowly.”

She released his hold on him, just a little. And he gritted his teeth as if to snap at her. And, oh, he was angry.

It occurred to Merrill he probably wanted this over and done with. He probably expected her to magic him fully hard, and she could have – with this amount of control over where his blood went and what it did. It was probably how Fenris was going to live with himself when this was over – tell himself that she had aroused him with her magic and made this happen and he’d just gone along with it enough to see it done.

But it was more fun if she didn’t, wasn’t it?

She held the blood back in the pit of his stomach, and she wondered if he could tell, given the way he glared at her. More fun to let him work himself up and hold him back and keep him frustrated and wanting until he couldn’t tell how much he desired this and how much she’d made him desire it.

She wouldn’t let him use both hands. Only one. And not even the whole of that hand. He drew his cock slowly through the ring curled between his index finger and thumb. He was letting out little huffs and whines now. Quiet but visceral. And, oh, she really liked him like this, she decided. He was large and muscular for an elf. And very strong, she knew. And she had the entirety of that fully under her thumb and collapsing against the wall with a flurry of cute, keening whimpers. Because of her. Her. Her.

She was already wet, when she reached down to touch herself. She traced her lips and pressed her hips down against her hand as her middle finger jabbed at her clit in short, smart rhythms. But the angle wasn’t right, and she didn’t need to look at Fenris for this. The noises he made were enough. She flopped forward and pressed her head into her mattress, as she ground her hips down into her hand.

She closed her eyes, just so she could listen and feel. And she must have looked ridiculous and not at all attractive – curled over on herself and bucking her hips down into the bed, too skinny legs splayed out from an overlarge and unflattering under shirt, not even turned to face the one she was with. But it didn’t matter because she could hear him pant and whimper and cry, and she was doing this to him. She was the one pinning him him there, and the one making him come, and it felt so good and didn’t matter.

It was only instinct when it got like this. Too many sensations and thoughts and sounds to experience them all. Her touch on Fenris was so light at this point, she wasn’t even sure she was holding the spell. But, still, she had held him and commanded him and it only meant more for her own power if she’d done it with only the softest of suggestions and the barest pull of magic. She thought about that, and groaned as she rocked herself to the short spasms of her climax. She was vaguely aware of when the bed dipped, and Fenris sat down on the foot of it.

It was a moment for her to breathe and open her eyes and let her vision readjust. She pulled her hands away a little, and squeezed tentatively at her own thigh. It was a little sticky from her own slick.

She curled her torso around, so she could see Fenris. He was sitting primly on the bed, sans his leggings, and staring at the wall. He reached a hand over for a moment, as if to set it on her calf, but seemed to think better of it and set it gently on his own lap.

She studied her left hand. Her thumb had scabbed over, where she had bit it for an opening into Fenris’s blood. Teeth weren’t as clean as the knife she usually kept, she thought. If it infected Anders would have to heal it. She imagined the judgemental looks he’d give her, and maybe he wouldn’t do anything more than that. Or maybe he’d talk about being puppetted around in your own body, trying to scream, and she was scared. Merrill was scared.

“See,” Fenris said. “You _are_ only a few steps away. You already seize upon the blood of the unwilling. Unless you mean to tell me the thugs you paralysed at the docks for me and Hawke to cut through were willing?”

Fenris’s voice at this juncture sounded less accusatory. It was soft, like Marethari, thinking she had pulled the upper hand, now trying to walk Merrill through a garden displaying all her faults. It was somehow more infuriating than Fenris’s anger.

Merrill could not argue that the thugs on the dock were willing to have their blood commandeered, any more than Fenris could argue they were willing to have their chest cavities torn open. But it was foolish to talk about things that were out of the room when there were so many things _in_ the room to talk about.

“I have seized your blood. You –” She could not keep the taunt out of her voice, “were not unwilling.”

Fenris looked down at his lap, a little shame faced. She was not sure what she expected him to say, but it was not this:

“I was not unwilling with Danarius either.”

The temperature in the room dropped several degrees. Merrill shivered.

Fenris continued, as if he didn’t feel it at all. “I wasn’t unwilling. Even the ones who were chosen for sacrifice, I am not sure if they were unwilling. They cried and begged like cattle being led to slaughter.” Fenris shrugged. “They feared death, I am sure. But I do not know that they were unwilling. Does an animal know what it is to be unwilling?”

 _Yes,_ Merrill thought. _Even an animal knows._ But that was the least of it and she was so, so angry.

He was baring part of himself to her, she knew. Inviting her to soothe and accept. And maybe at another time she would have, but not right now, not today. He’d dragged her to a cove full of elvhen blood and accused her of the same things he had done and participated in. And she could see him, standing in his spiky armour and watching with that cold look of disdain as Hadriana laughed and Orana screamed and wailed and died. And she had never, ever – not in any of the human raids on the Dalish camps – stood by and watched the People be butchered and compared them to _cattle_.

“You aren’t an animal, Fenris,” Merrill spat, sitting up straight on the bed and curling her hands in the sheet hard enough to rip. “And neither were any of those you stood by and saw sacrificed. They were people.”

Fenris grimaced, and then looked down at his hands. She wondered if he’d never been truely resigned to that until this moment.

“Get out,” Merrill commanded, pointing to the exit. “You don’t need a blood mage to do this for you. If all you want is someone to hold you down and boss you around, you can go see Hawke.”

She bit her lip and gripped the her sheets with one hand. She’d never wanted to be this person, who would turn one of the People away. But she could not help him and he only made her worse. She’d use her blood and pull him under her thrall again if she had to. If it was what she needed to do to get him to leave.

Thankfully it didn’t come to that. Fenris said nothing, only hung his leggings over his shoulder and left. She could hear him pause in the main room, and then the small sounds of the door opening and closing.

Merrill shuddered into her hands. She didn’t really want to be alone. And she wanted to sleep. But if she did she’d dream only of Tamlen and Mahariel and the Black City, and she’d let them in even though she knew they were only demons and she couldn’t. She couldn’t sleep. She was so afraid.

She only breathed into her hands for a moment, then wiped sharply under her eyes. She stood, and pulled her shawl back over her head and returned to the main room. The fire was steady, and she had books left to study. She sat and tried not to think about any of her People, and Fenris least of all.


End file.
